Muddy

If you’re bored with running in ordinary 5K and 10K races, you might want to switch to ones where you quick-step through tires, carry sandbags, climb walls, and belly-crawl through pits of mud. These days, in cities all over the country, tens of thousands of competitors brave obstacle-course races in which they get so dirty that many discard their shoes at the end, and the shoes are gathered up, washed, and donated to charity. People looking for this kind of challenge usually start by going online and finding out about events called Warrior Dash, Spartan Race, Tough Mudder, or Muddy Buddy. Maybe they see that the Merrell Down & Dirty National Mud and Obstacle Series is coming to a nearby venue. Perhaps they notice that the New York site is Orchard Beach, at Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx, on a Sunday morning in the fall. In a sellout surge amounting to about fifty-six hundred entrants, they sign up. Registration fees for adults are sixty, seventy, or seventy-five dollars. On the appointed day, as the sky gets light, these people and their friends and families start to fill the gigantic Orchard Beach parking lot as New York City police vigorously wave them in.

A huge amount of preparation is required just to make the mud pits. And to set up the Emergency Eye Wash Station! And to arrange for eight six-thousand-gallon tanker trucks of fresh water to supply the rinsing-off area! Also, there are more than a hundred volunteers. At Obstacle No. 11, the Pushups, where runners had to drop down and do ten on a piece of all-weather carpet, stood a volunteer named Austin Renzetti, in a blue-and-gray camo U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps uniform. He explained to a non-competitor that he was a junior at New Rochelle High School and the camo was intended not to fool an enemy but to mask the paint spatters that sailors get on their clothes when they paint their ships. Suddenly, he turned away to superintend the pushups of Yury Shtankov, a competitor from Brooklyn, who did his ten and took off again like a shot. Shtankov ran in only a pair of shorts, without shoes, and turned in the fastest 10K time not only here but for the entire year of Merrell Down & Dirty, etc., competitions.

As the finishers began to accumulate in the encampment of promotional tents (Paul Mitchell hair-grooming products, Subaru, Merrell athletic wear) surrounding the finish line, different styles of muddiness were on display—hair mud-slicked to scalp, mud trickles following contours of the face, patches of mud on arms and shins already drying a light gray, clumps of wet mud adhering to T-shirts inscribed “Mud-Life Crisis” or “Eat Clean—Get Dirty.” When very muddy, all people tend to smile in the same way. On a less mud-trodden patch of grass, a goateed young man named Dan, who said that he works at Citco, a hedge fund with offices in Jersey City, ate Doritos and confided that his company had encouraged employees to participate as a team-building exercise, and thirty or forty Citco people had done it.

More than half the competitors were women. By and large, they kept pace with or outdistanced the guys, showed no hesitation at the mud, and came out equally muddy. Muddy mothers rejoined completely clean dads who were minding the stroller and one or two kids of preschool age. The children regarded their gentler parent in her all-mud transformation and did not know what to make of her. When a super-competitive mom, exhilarated at having come in first in her age group, hugged her son and daughter, they cried. The little girl kept brushing at the mud the embrace had left on her sweater and looking fretfully at a muddy streak on the face of her doll. After the 5K and the 10K races had finished, there was a mile race for kids between the ages of seven and thirteen. Like the 5K and the 10K, the kids’ course ended just beyond the mud. When they reached that final obstacle, many did not want to plunge. “No standing in the mud pit!” the announcer kept saying. “Don’t be afraid to get dirty! C’mon, kids, where else can you get dirty like this?” Most of the kids ignored him and stepped through as fastidiously as wading egrets.

After almost everybody had left, the wide expanse of the Orchard Beach parking lot was marked here and there by abandoned pairs of shoes. ♦